31–40 of 57 posts
I legitimately have no idea what infrastructure provisioning tool to use anymore. I normally defaulted to Saltstack Masterless and Chef via Packer. What "simple" tool is left anymore for me to create my immutable AMIs that aren't bound by some license?
I went back to shell scripts.
Chef did not make a clean transition into the immutable world. Chef Client was great for persistent infrastructure, but the options got dicier once we started talking about pre-provisioned infrastructure like image building: 1. Chef Solo (how I last used it when attempting this), which felt intentionally hobbled. All you needed was one poorly-behaved cookbook that called `search` and the bets were off. 2. Chef Zero,…
2013 called and wants its favorite infrastructure as code (IaC) tool back.
Are there Chef Habitat users in the wild?
These are just my anecdotes, for sure, but (also anecdotal) I rarely hear of other "ops" type people using Chef, and most of the ones I know never got more than just their feet wet with Chef (the SaltStack beta was out early enough to avoid Chef).
I haven't encountered any Chef code in almost ten years. For the stragglers not yet primarily on Kubernetes and Terraform, I see Ansible and some extra Terraform. Maybe I see some Salt here and there. These are just my anecdotes, for sure, but (also anecdotal) I rarely hear of other "ops" type people using Chef, and most of the ones I know never got more than just their feet wet with Chef (the SaltStack beta was out…
Chef did not make a clean transition into the immutable world. Chef Client was great for persistent infrastructure, but the options got dicier once we started talking about pre-provisioned infrastructure like image building: 1. Chef Solo (how I last used it when attempting this), which felt intentionally hobbled. All you needed was one poorly-behaved cookbook that called `search` and the bets were off. 2. Chef Zero,…
In my experience, it was the need for orchestration that killed it but we are probably using different definitions of "immutable", where in Chef context I think of it as the infrastructure.
For me the killer feature of ansible for me was the ability to gate based on remote state, which really was incompatible with the foundational engineering choices that were almost ideal for its original target.
When you were upgrading rabbitmq, postgres, etc... the view from other cluster nodes was critical, not the local view.
Both chef and puppets tried to graft on what they called orchestration, but was really just batch jobs.
Immutable infrastructure was fairly easy IMHO with chef if your architectural quantum was a machine, but not for situations where that quantum was a cluster, especially with data that needed to persist like with Cassandra etc...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chef is an infrastructure as code configuration system. The binaries are now proprietary. This is a FOSS replacement.
Huh. Given Ruby/Chef lost, are the Chef maintainers going for a final financial squeeze of whoever is still on the platform?
2013 called and wants its favorite infrastructure as code (IaC) tool back.
Chef is still popular in the enterprise. It's a good tool.
After using it for a few years, accumulated enough quirks to significantly diminish my initial enthusiasm. The concurrency gotchas, the utter lack of debugging and profiling tools, the weak management of today's most common deployment models (e.g. Docker/containers and cloud services)...it's not "good" by 2025 standards.
I'm sure enterprises still do use it. But they also still use RPG, PL/I, and IMS. So...